Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [91]
I grab my things and I leave him there, all lights out in the GDR.
21
Frau Paul
I know very little about this woman. The guide at Stasi HQ was so adamant I needed to speak with her that I just called and made a time. I take the train from Mitte to the end of the line at Elsterwerdaer Platz, in the southern part of East Berlin. Then I wait for a bus to Frau Paul’s.
At the bus stop there’s a Vietnamese flower-seller with a stall of sad and frostbitten flowers. The GDR imported North Vietnamese ‘socialist brothers’ as workers, and treated them badly. They lived in camps, and were bussed to work in factories each day so as to avoid contact with the locals. Now, they manage as best they can.
I buy the least tired-looking arrangement I can see. It’s baby’s breath with carnations. For some reason it looks funereal. The vendor is a tiny man with a face stretched like a mummy and teeth that don’t fit in his mouth. He gives me change from a leather pocket in his apron and offers me a cigarette. I take it and we smile at one another. Then he bends down under the counter, and pulls out a carton of Marlboro Reds. ‘Cigarette?’ he asks again, grinning widely.
‘No, thanks,’ I say. So this wilted flower stall is a front for black-market cigarettes. Truckloads of them are smuggled in from Poland to avoid duties and taxes and are sold, largely by Vietnamese, on street corners, at the entrance to the underground, or, more poetically, at flower stalls. I like this man’s cover, and his generous style.
A large woman in her early sixties opens the door. She has a cap of dark hair and very blue eyes in a soft face. I follow her into the living room, filled with a pair of vinyl couches and hanging potted plants. Everything here is, as my mother would say, ‘spic and span’, and so is Sigrid Paul. Her clothes and hair are neat and she has the tapered plump fingers of a mournful magdalene. In them she is already holding a pressed handkerchief. She has made exquisite open sandwiches of mashed egg, and pink meat with stripes of gherkin.
Frau Paul apologises to me in advance. ‘I lose my track,’ she says. ‘It might use up lots of tape. I have written a short biographical note’—she picks it up from the coffee table—‘so I don’t depart from the theme.’ She seems wobbly, a woman holding onto notes on her own life. She hands me the two-page account. The heading reads, ‘The Wall Went Straight through My Heart’.
Frau Paul doesn’t, however, use the notes. It is true that she loses her thread, and sometimes repeats herself. But she tells her story well.
In January 1961, Frau Paul—who then went by her married name of Rührdanz—a dental technician, gave birth to her first child. The labour was difficult—a breech birth. The doctors were changing shifts and there was a delay in attending to her. By the time they did, she says, ‘one leg was already out’ but they performed an emergency caesarean anyway.
For the first few days after he was born Torsten Rührdanz spat blood. He couldn’t feed at all. The doctors thought it might be some kind of stomach trouble and tried to give him tea. Six days after the birth Frau Paul was sent home from hospital, but her baby was keeping very little nourishment down. And he was still spitting up blood. She took him to a hospital in the eastern part of the city but they could not find what was wrong. ‘This made me very nervous,’ she says. ‘For my husband and me he was the child of our dreams.’
Then she took him to the Westend Hospital in the western sector of the city, where they gave her a diagnosis within twenty-four hours: Torsten had suffered a ruptured diaphragm during delivery. His stomach and oesophagus were damaged; there was inflammation and internal bleeding. The condition was life-threatening, so they operated immediately. Torsten recuperated in hospital.
By early July 1961 he was well enough to be taken home, with strict instructions for his feeding and medication. Frau Paul and her husband Hartmut were to collect special formula and medicines regularly from the Westend Hospital. Although